The Daily Swarm

UPDATE: AP:

The Los Angeles Times apologized for using documents that were apparently fabricated in a story implicating associates of Sean “Diddy” Combs in a 1994 assault on rapper Tupac Shakur.

“The bottom line is that the documents we relied on should not have been used,” Editor Russ Stanton said in a story posted Wednesday night on the newspaper’s Web site. “We apologize both to our readers and to those referenced in the documents… and in the story.”

Pulitzer-prize winning reporter Chuck Philips, who wrote the story, and his supervisor, Deputy Managing Editor Marc Duvoisin, also apologized.

The apologies followed an investigation launched by Stanton after The Smoking Gun Web site reported earlier in the day that the paper was conned by a prisoner who doctored the documents.

Combs denied that he had any prior knowledge of or involvement in the robbery and shooting of Shakur at a New York recording studio. He and other subjects of the story claimed they had been defamed by the newspaper.

The Smoking Gun:

Last week’s bombshell Los Angeles Times report claiming that the 1994 shooting of Tupac Shakur in the lobby of a Manhattan recording studio was carried out by associates of Sean “Diddy” Combs and that the rap impresario knew of the plot beforehand was based largely on fabricated FBI reports, The Smoking Gun has learned.

The Times appears to have been hoaxed by an imprisoned con man and accomplished document forger, an audacious swindler who has created a fantasy world in which he managed hip-hop luminaries, conducted business with Combs, Shakur, Busta Rhymes, and The Notorious B.I.G., and even served as Combs’s trusted emissary to Death Row Records boss Marion “Suge” Knight during the outset of hostilities in the bloody East Coast-West Coast rap feud.

EARLIER: L.A. Times’ Chuck Philips defends Diddy put the hit on Tupac story…

EARLIER: L.A. Times: P. Diddy’s people put the hit on Tupac and launched the East Coast/West Coast war…